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Tag Archives: Kevin Durant

The worst rule change in sports history has to be when David Stern announced the NBA would no longer accept high school basketball players to go straight to the NBA.

The number two high school sophomore in the country Harry Giles in the grey shirt will have to attend college(Thomas Frey)

The first class of high school players that weren’t allowed to the NBA was the Greg Oden and Kevin Durant class. Oden would have been number one pick to the Toronto Raptors and probably wouldn’t be this injured. The Chicago Bulls had the second pick which they traded to Portland. Lets assume that Chicago hadn’t traded that pick, because frankly, if Durant were available they wouldn’t have traded most likely. Chicago fans, your team had some decent guys, adding Durant would have meant championships. What a perfect place for Michael Jordan’s heir to play.

The 2004 and 2005 McDonald’s All American games were great. The practices of those years were more competitive then the 2006-2013 McDonald’s games combined. Their was so much on the line. Stern pretty much made the McDonald’s game pointless to watch. It is a great honor to be named a McDonald’s All American, but when the NBA isn’t on the line, it isn’t as important. It used to be the best.

I salute players like Brandon Jennings, Jeremy Tyler and Latavious Williams. Instead of going to college and making the greedy NCAA tons of money in exchange for pretty much nothing, they turned professional. Jennings and Tyler went to Europe while Williams played in the development league.

Why should a player risk millions of dollars and go to college? Lets take a look at some former rivals.com number one rated high school players.

Josh Selby was the number one prospect in 2010. He had eligibility issues and had to miss part of the season at Kansas. Then when he was able to play in mid-season he was out of the mix and could never get in the groove. He then declared for the draft. Instead of being a high pick out of high school and being richer then he could have ever imagined, he had to waste a year of his life in college and has never made more then a million dollars in a season.

Shabazz Muhammad exited high school as not only the top player of his class, but one of the best high school players in history. He had to miss time like Selby and had trouble in college. Muhammad would have been the first pick in the draft out of high school. After a year at UCLA he still was a first round pick, but he wasn’t a top ten pick.

I believe that Selby and Muhammad would be NBA stars if they didn’t have to go to college.

Their are many players who were ranked as top ten high school players that couldn’t go to the NBA and lost their draft stock in college.

Imagine if you knew you were going to make a minimum of ten million dollars in the NBA, would you want to take college classes?